Speaking Volumes

by Franck Billé

Having engaged with the recent volumetric turn in architecture and political geography, anthropologists are increasingly concerned with realms such as air, oceans, riparian environments, and outer space, as well as with their social, political, and cultural reverberations. This Theorizing the Contemporary series, which grew out of a panel at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, brings into dialogue these converging interests in volumetric sovereignty and more-than-human geographies. The contributors suggest that this theoretical confluence can be especially illuminating for border processes and phenomena that extend beyond the two-dimensional.

[Editor’s Note, 6/27/18: I am pleased to share eleven additional contributions to this series: Barb, Echolocation, Flyways, Gravity, Scaleless, Sensing, Sluice, Spongiform, Volatility, Views, and Watershed. Stay tuned for news about the forthcoming book, which will include extended versions of seventeen of these interventions as well contributions by Arjun Appadurai and Debbora Battaglia. A follow-up collection of twenty-five short essays will also be published at Society and Space in early 2019.]